Networking Archives - Lostdomain

Using Tailscale for Home Lab VPN Connectivity

September 12, 2022 / Martijn / 2 Comments

I’m always looking to simplify connectivity between my networks’ different connections. With a home lab, colocated servers, and a few clouds that host projects, it’s a web.

This was all connected with VPNs in the past, but everyone hates VPNs.

I moved to SD-WAN when VMware acquired VeloCloud, and I had the fortune to get a few SD-WAN edges. But I handed them back when I left VMware, so I also needed to update the connectivity.

Enter Tailscale.

Note: this is not a sponsored post. I just really, really like the product. 😃

Tailscale?

The Cloudcast introduced me … Read more

SmartNIC – The Next Step in Networking

November 16, 2020 / Martijn / 1 Comment

There has been more and more talk about something called SmartNICs. Development originally started with AWS as an internal project for their cloud, simplifying their network operations and making the physical network devices simpler, dumber, and easier to manage. To me, this evolution is the next step in the networking layer.

The reason why is simple. For the last few years, the industry is moving away from complicated configurations in individual network devices, to simpler configurations in centrally managed controllers. Abstracting away complexity while we scale, is key there. By moving the network configuration to the server NICs, instead of … Read more

Routed VPN between VMware Cloud on AWS and VyOS

May 19, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

VMware Cloud on AWS has a few different connectivity options: Direct Connect, Policy-based VPN, and Routed-VPN.

In my experience, most people seem to pick Direct Connect and Policy-based VPN first, before even thinking about Routed-VPN. But, as with most things in life, you’ll find that one use case for that option you’d never use otherwise. 😉

I had to build a routed-VPN from VMware Cloud on AWS to a VyOS router recently, and it had some options to take into account and took a while to figure out. This post goes into the configuration on both sides. Mostly on the … Read more

IP Address Management with vRealize Network Insight

March 5, 2020 / Martijn / 0 Comments

vRealize Network Insight knows all and see all that’s happening within a network. Due to the search engine and the ability to pull out any data on the infrastructure, new use cases pop up now and then. Lately, I’ve been approached by a few organizations that are using Network Insight as an IP Address Management (IPAM) system, or to complete their existing IPAM system and compare and contrast it to the live infrastructure.

Here are a few examples: checking whether which IP addresses are free in a particular IP range. Comparing the IPAM registrations to the IP addresses that are … Read more

Roneo: A NetFlow Duplicator

October 16, 2019 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Introducing a new project that I’ve been working on: Roneo the NetFlow Duplicator.

It is essentially a very simplistic and fast UDP traffic forwarder written in Python, that’s designed to forward NetFlow/sFlow traffic. You might know that I work with vRealize Network Insight a lot, which ingests NetFlow data. There are some limitations with NetFlow devices (vSphere Distributed Switch can only send to 1 collector, and there are some other devices that have the same limitation), making a duplicator necessary when the flows need to go to multiple systems.

Why something new?

I’ve written about sending NetFlow to multiple collectors … Read more

VMware NSX-V Control and Management Plane Connections Diagram

August 21, 2018 / Martijn / 0 Comments

This is a quick post about an awesome depiction of the control and management plane connection channels without VMware NSX for vSphere. A colleague of mine, Omkar Singh, put this together and it gives a very good look at what communication is required between the different NSX-v components.

It’s also available as a PDF.

Using PowerNSX to get all routes on NSX Edges

June 14, 2018 / Martijn / 1 Comment

This is going to be a short one! I received an interesting question from Sander Martijn about retrieving all IP routes from an NSX Edge. There is no API endpoint available in NSX to get the current routes and the only way this information can get retrieved is using the NSX Central CLI. You can easily see all routes on the Central CLI by using the command: show edge edge-id ip route.

PowerNSX has an Invoke-NsxCli cmdlet which executes the Central CLI with a specific query. Because of this, you can retrieve the routes with a PowerShell script and … Read more

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